TL;DR – This first episode has left me cautiously optimistic, but I am not sure if it can sustain the momentum it has set for itself, and I am concerned about some of the sharper edges getting sanded back.  

Disclosure – I paid for the Netflix service that viewed this show.

Warning – This episode contains scenes that may cause distress.

3 Body Problem Review –

There was a certain amount of nervousness as I sat down to watch the first episode of 3 Body Problem: Countdown. It would be a lie to say that Season 8 of Game of Thrones was not part of that, even though I think I am a bit kinder on that than many. But more than that, how is an American team going to go adapting a work that is deeply entrenched in Chinese history and culture into an international product? That is the question I am looking at today.  

So to set the scene, we opened at Tsinghua University, Beijing, in 1966, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. Where students are bringing their professors out in front of the mob for the charge of being counterrevolutionaries. It is here where a young Ye Wenjie (Zine Tseng) watches as the crowd and members of her own family turn against her father, Ye Zhetai (Perry Yung), for teaching the Big Bang Theory. The crowd roars as the older man is beaten to death in front of them. In 2024, in London, Da Shi (Benedict Wong) arrives at the site of a scientist who committed suicide, a countdown written in blood on the walls. One of many reasons is that physics has stopped working as particle accelerators across the world have decided to put out nonsense. Now from here, we will be looking at the episode as a whole, so there will be some [SPOILERS] ahead.     

While I have some concerns, I will make it clear that they have done a good job of capturing the life of Ye Wenjie. It is a bit truncated, so you lose some of the devastating nuances, but we do hit all the high notes on her way to working at the secret Red Coast military base. It is a bleak tail, and you can understand just how that would have shaped a person. I wish that we had spent some more time exploring this, as without the monologue, we have had a much flatter view of the situation. Also, you can feel that they sanded back some of the pointier edges, which is a shame, because those are the things that leave an impact.

The significant change to the narrative is that the location of the present-day section has shifted from Beijing to London. This takes the internationalisation that was at the fringes of the novel and brings it right into the centre. I am not going to get into the weeds about the appropriateness of shifting from a predominantly Chinese cast in the books to a more broadly international one in the series. There are better people than me to get into that conversation. But I do want to at least flag that this is what the show has done.

On the whole, it does feel like some of the story elements have been shifted around and split up between the Oxford Five (Jess Hong, Jovan Adepo, Eiza González, John Bradley & Alex Sharp). However, while the events are a bit all over the place character-wise, they do fit in a narrative perspective. I will say while I have my concerns about this part of the narrative, Benedict Wong’s casting was genius, and he absolutely captured the essence of Da Shi. Also, it is time to give Rosalind Chao the spotlight that she deserves. I am not entirely convinced about some aspects of the production. There are moments with the countdown when it is well realised, and other times, like large crowds, where we hit an odd uncanny valley. There were some pivotable scenes when I got ripped out of the narrative because of this.

In the end, do we recommend 3 Body Problem: Countdown? Well, this episode was all about setting the scene, and on that front, I think it did okay. We have yet to really get to the titular 3 Body Problem, but there was the grounding of this world and its people. Now that it has set its foundation, the next question is: how well is it prepared to get weird because the novel goes places.      

By Brian MacNamara: You can follow Brian on Twitter Here, when he’s not chatting about Movies and TV, he’ll be talking about International Relations, or the Solar System.

Have you seen 3 Body Problem yet ?, let us know what you thought in the comments below, feel free to share this review on any of the social medias and you can follow us Here. Check out all our past reviews and articles Here, and have a happy day.    

Credits – All images were created by the cast, crew, and production companies of 3 Body Problem
Directed by – Derek Tsang
Written by – David Benioff & D. B. Weiss & Alexander Woo
Created by – David Benioff & D. B. Weiss & Alexander Woo
Based On – The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin
Production/Distribution Companies – Bighead Littlehead, T-Street, Yoozoo Group, Plan B Entertainment, Primitive Streak & Netflix
Starring – Jovan Adepo, John Bradley, Rosalind Chao, Liam Cunningham, Eiza González, Jess Hong, Marlo Kelly, Alex Sharp, Sea Shimooka, Zine Tseng, Saamer Usmani, Benedict Wong & Jonathan Pryce and Yu Guming, Gerard Monaco, Vedette Lim, Deng Qiaozhi, Lan Xiya, Sun Yan, Yang Hewen, Perry Yung, Li Fengxu, Jeanne Yuan, Steven H Li, Guy Burnet & Emily Kimball